(no subject)

[sapote]

I am trying to read Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter's Long Earth books and is this how Stephen Baxter tends to go? Because it is very Characters Arrive in Place. Characters have long, long self-reflective internal monologue about the noble pioneering spirit. Sometimes characters talk to each other about the noble pioneering spirit and also how noble and pioneering it is. Sometimes in the background someone does something that's noble and pioneering, which, in its specifics, gets skipped right over so that we can have another monologue about it being, on a meta-level, a noble pioneering thing to do. Also everyone has cell phones and vaccines so there's pretty much no peril at all, just noble pioneering pioneering nobly.

The whole thing is making me wonder if I dislike settlement stories, which is actually ridiculous, I love settlement stories. They are one of the only places where my love of logistics is fully indulged and I get to hear where the window glass came from and who made it and what everyone had for dinner and how they cooked it. I am all for Laura Ingalls Wilder in space, y'all, did you see my space farming post? I think I'm annoyed because so far these books seem to be about the metaphysical concept and now some politics or something, and no one's gotten bitten by a mosquito or almost lost a leg to gangrene or otherwise had the rubber hit the road. Even the protagonist, Joshua, who spends most of his young adulthood wandering in untracked wilderness alone across the face of a giant probability-splits of the unsettled Earth, comes back with a glamorous tan and never seems to have actually felt any risk or bodily experience of discomfort that puts the comfort of the high technology that's encroaching on the alter-Earths in perspective. I think it's the fact that all these people seem basically culturally unchanged, like suburbanite friends at a PTA meeting who just happen to also be the first settlers on an unclaimed Earth? Maybe I'm just not interested enough in the metaphysics of the pioneering spirit? Because I really do have limited feelings about the mythos; I live two hours' drive from where my first paternal ancestor landed on the beach, and that was about enough for us, as far as westward migration. I just want more stories about window glass and stove fuel.

Man, I am cranky about canons this week. At least I'm having fun with it.

Comments

[lastscorpion]

I totally agree! I returned the 2nd book to the library without finishing it. I felt like I could kind of tell the difference, in the first one, between the stuff that was Pratchett and the stuff that was Baxter. The 2nd book had little if any of the Pratchett-seeming stuff, IMO. There was almost nothing that was either funny or awesome in it.

[wychwood]

I found The Long Earth utterly frustrating - it was such a fabulous concept, and could have been so interesting, but they abandoned basically everything I was intrigued by in order to go on a long, dull journey to nowhere. (see my rantings here). Clearly what we need is a fandom movement to write all of this stuff for them, since they can't be bothered.

[sapote]

That's where I'm at, and I'm usually a really stubborn book-finisher. Have you read anything else by Baxter? Is he always like this?

[sapote]

Yeah! Exactly! Long boring spaceship ride that goes to zero places of interest, and no follow-through of any kind. Is Baxter always like this?

[lastscorpion]

No, I've never read anything else of his.

[wychwood]

I don't like Baxter, but I don't think that's is a reflection of what I would consider his usual sins. The horrible gender stuff, yes; boringness of other kinds, definitely; long spaceship rides, less so.